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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.

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Moores Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moores Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moores Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesnt apply. In this blog well take a daily look at new implications of Moores Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.

The newspaper industry is downright gleeful over this. Julie Bosman’s lead is dripping with sarcasm.

FOR several years, Craigslist.org has been aggressively taking classified advertising from newspapers.

Now Craigslist is the one under attack.

The story, and the suit, are deliberately misleading. They both ignore the fact that the ads in question are free.

In that way they’re not really ads at all. They are speech.

Which changes the legal principle. To force on site managers a responsibility to police all speech for all potential legal violations would render free speech impossible.

Now, Craigslist does charge for some ads. In some categories, including New York housing ads, it’s trying to draw in some money. Some think it should be more aggressive in this. And when it does that, then it does have an obligation, under the law, to keep its customers from practicing discrimination. It will also, then, have the money to do it.

But in this case, we’re not talking about real commercial speech. We’re talking about free speech, speech for which no fee is charged. It may have a commercial purpose, but in that case the violator is the person placing the ad, not Craigslist itself. The responsibility, if there is one, flows to the speaker, not the publisher.

But there is a solution that will please the plaintiffs in this case.

Craigslist and the Lawyers’ Committee simply come up with a clear, simple statement about what ads must not say. This could be sent to every user of Craigslist, and should be part of the TOS people agree to before posting anything.

At that point, any “illegal” “ad” becomes the responsibility of the poster, and the Lawyers’ Committee can be as clear as it wants that it plans to go after people who offend the guidelines.

This sounds like a fair solution. Unless, of course, the lawyers’ just care for money, or for playing the game of the newspaper industry against Craigslist. But playing an industry’s game won’t help the people they claim to represent at all.

This is all fine and well except you forgot the CDA prevents liability from being placed on Craigslist.

So unless you re-write the CDA, as it currently stands Craigslist /could/ charge for ads AND still not have liability for their content.

But let's not confuse Craiglist's CDA-granted liability shield with the notion that commercial speech on the Internet cannot be controlled.

The CDA allows for this, it just places the legal liability on the one who breaks the law, the original author of the ad.

Websites are not publishers, says the CDA, and if Congress meant to also say "except when Internet housing ads violate FHA" they should have put that in 47 USC Section 230. But they didn't, so here we are.